Perhaps Steve Jobs was right in stepping off the limelight and allow “Apple to deliver extraordinary products“, as Apple have managed to generate excitement around a ‘deliverable’, rather than the ‘deliverer’.

I’ve read an interesting book called ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion’ (: US | UK), by Robert B. Cialdini. It outlines 6 universal “weapons of influence” that are used to persuade people, and how to defend yourself against them:

1. Reciprocation: The Old Give and Take… and Take
2. Commitment and Consistency: Hobgoblins of the Mind
3. Social Proof: Truths Are Us
4. Liking: The Friendly Thief
5. Authority: Directed Deference
6. Scarcity: The Rule of the Few

A good example of this is the labelling technique, which falls under ‘Commitment and Consistency’. It involves assigning a trait, attitude, or belief to a person and then making a request of that person that’s consistent with that label. In practice, for example, this could translate to you telling someone that you consider them to be an above-average citizen that is likely to vote and participate in political events. They would then see themselves a bit differently, as a better citizen, maybe even one that votes!

A more useful example can be used when talking to customer service agents. Knowing that they can sometimes be less-than-helpful when you ask for a tough request, try telling them that “you’re so happy with the service so far that you’re going to write a positive letter or email about your interaction to his or her supervisor as soon as you get off the phone”. If they’re human, they will be more likely to reciprocate the respect and try harder to help you with your request.

I’m currently reading the sequel, titled ‘Yes!: 50 secrets from the science of persuasion’ (: US | UK), where it basically lists 50 great examples of the 6 persuasive principals above. It’s like a goody bag, but in book form!

So I’ve decided to do the next best thing and brain dump a few interesting facts, moments, or whatever you want to call them, in a list.

• Video advertising is the next big thing. Not the 30-sec ad kind, but where you can click on an item in a video clip, like a t-shirt somebody is wearing, and more information displays, where you can amongst other things – buy that same t-shirt.
• VideoClix demonstrated a product that that allows you to do this at the conference, and it works pretty well.
• Microsoft adLab is fairly useful. Even though I’d say only about 5-or so people actually knew about it before the conference. Check out the ‘Demographics Prediction’, ‘Search Funnels’, and ‘Search Volume Forecasting’. Still hard to believe it’s a free offering from Microsoft!
• Digg co-founder Jay Adelson gave a talk on ‘Tapping into the Advertising Potential of New Media’, which was fairly interesting. He played the Fred and Barney smoking Winston’s cigarettes clip. That brought some things in perspective in a funny and surreal way.
• Mike Hudack from blip.tv skipped some of his slides to avoid paparazzi-style sneaky pics being taken of his treasured bar graphs.
• Jim Coudal from ‘The Deck‘ and ‘Coudal Partners‘ gave a very inspiring and funny talk on how things work at The Deck. One 120×90 ad per page per day, and only of services that The Deck have personally tried. That’s it. The advantage? Readers enjoy the clean layout, Advertisers don’t compete for attention on a page, and the site owner gets a fair cut. I was actually looking forward to his talk from the beginning as I had seen him in the viral video, ‘Copy Goes Here‘
• Met some interesting people. Namely Darren Rowse from Problogger, Andrej Nabergoj, and Chris Hart.

Overall it was a very refreshing week away in New York with my cousin Ivan. I’ll upload a few pictures on here soon.

Ryan Carson has kindly given me a free ticket to attend this years Future of Online Advertising (FOOA) conference in New York. I’m really looking forward to meeting and discussing a few ideas with other attendees and speakers. A few names pop to mind right now: Steve Rubel of the MicroPersuasion blog, Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners and Jay Adelson of digg.

Obviously the list of interesting people doesn’t stop there, and I look forward to meeting many more creative minds at the event.